“Popcorn” fabric is a reversibly expandable fabric that has a plurality of dimples (also referred to as puckers) to provide its reversibly expandable feature. Popcorning fabric allows inexpensive fabric to expand more than the limited two times expansion of more expensive fabric materials like Spandex. Expanding at least three times its initial size can allow a garment made using this technique to be one-size-fits-all. The ability to expand that much is currently only achieved using skilled craftsperson to make the hundreds of “popcorn” dimples in the fabric.
Traditional methods of creating popcorn fabric are to cut a bolt of fabric into individual garment shapes and sew each garment prior to adding the puckers that allow the garment to expand. Garments are sewn prior to making puckers simply because the expansion of the puckered fabric in any direction would make sewing very difficult. Using this conventional method, garment workers gather each individual portion of the fabric to make each pucker around a thin tool or finger of the worker. The worker then takes a thread and loops it tightly around the base of the newly created fabric pucker. When the thread loop is very tight, the worker withdraws the tool and pushes it into the fabric adjacent to the first pucker to create another pucker using the same method. This leads to a plurality of individual puckers secured by tightly drawn thread loops at the base of each pucker in the fabric. The hand movements of the worker is not dramatically different from hand movements used in crocheting fabric. Puckers in the fabric are added one at a time.
The thread bound fabric is then treated using steam and pressure in a pressure cooker so the fabric is permanently set to keep puckers in the fabric. Then the single thread that secures all of the puckers in each garment is pulled until it unwinds its way all the way back to where the first pucker had been tied. This knot is removed and the dimpled fabric is put into a bath solution to soften the fabric. The result is a fabric having a plurality of reversibly expandable dimples. When stretched, the dimpled fabric can readily expand up to three times or more its relaxed or un-stretched width or size. In its relaxed state the fabric returns to its smaller size, showing the dimples in their largest size. Conventional dimples are often round-ended, cylindrical shaped, resembling to the shape of a garment worker's tool, or finger, around which the fabric is wound.
A major shortcoming of the “popcorn” technique is that the fabric garment must be sewn prior to the “popcorning” process because trying to sew fabric that has been popcorned is tremendously difficult as it can expand or contract in any direction. Sewing each garment prior to popcorning has meant that up until now, putting the hundreds of popcorn puckers into each garment has been done only by hand, one garment at a time. This conventional methodology for creating popcorn fabric imposes numerous man hours to form popcorn shaped structures in the fabric and is thus inefficient. Each popcorned fabric has been the result of extensive hand craftsmanship by individual artisans, mostly in China, using a production method called “distributed manufacturing”. In this process pre-sewn garments are distributed throughout a village so each garment can be sewn into puckers by hand to prepare it for treating.
The conventional methodology does not provide for more complex detailed popcorn structure nor for a process to create fabric popcorn structures on an object such as a bag. A serious problem with conventional popcorned fabric, utilized in for example a bag, is that it imparts no structure to the bag so that, for example, a popcorned handbag looks good until a cell phone is dropped inside causing the bag to droop down to very nearly the full extension of the bag. This shortcoming dramatically limits the value of a “popcorn” fabric bag, which is why they have never enjoyed the widespread popularity of popcorned garments.
A creative challenge is that 2.6 billion dollars a year in paper gift wrap is discarded in the United States. This means a staggering volume of trees need to be harvested and processed into gift wrap in order to satisfy the US appetite for gift wrap. Unfortunately, the gift wrap is discarded almost immediately after gifting. As a result, huge volumes gift wrap become a part of our post holiday refuse stream and what were previously carbon absorbing, living trees become landfill.
The major alternative to paper gift wrap, is paper “gift” bags. In each case the paper provides little if any durability for re-use. Craft wraps using a variety of materials including recycled comic pages, family photos, artificial flowers, aluminum foil and other materials have represented a very small section of the gift giving market.
In searching for alternative fabric gift wrap solutions to satisfy the majority of United States consumers in a production offering, Spandex and other expanding elastic based fabric materials have three major drawbacks: the first drawback is the high cost of the elastic fabric; the second drawback is that elastic materials typically expand only two times their initial size so dozens of elastic bags would be needed to cover any reasonable range of gift sizes, making it confusing for consumers to select the correctly sized fabric bag for their gift and severely limiting the size range a gift could be purchased to ever use that fabric gift bag again; finally, Spandex and other elastic materials tend to be form fitting and would hold to the wide cross section of a gift while sagging around other portions of a non-geometric or tapered form such as a football.
What is needed is an improved system and method for manufacturing dimpled fabric having a plurality of reversibly expandable dimples. What is also needed is an improved system and method for manufacturing dimpled fabric having detailed and complex shaped dimples. What is also needed is an improved system and method for forming dimples in fabric formed as containers or bags. What is also needed is a dimpled fabric gift wrap that does not have the shortcomings of not conforming to the contents within the bag nor incurs sagging around the contents. As gift wrap made of dimpled fabric to accommodate a wide range of gift sizes and shapes, with an opening that is quick and easy to open and close, the dimple fabric gift wrap can provide an ideal alternative to the time consuming and wasteful practice of using and discarding paper gift wrap products and ribbons. By using and re-using the fabric gift wrap environmental protection may be afforded.